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The Power of Social Media for B2B Firms

Posted on March 22, 2014 - 12:26 PM by

The Power of Social for B2B firms.

Many B2B/professional services firms are lukewarm at best about the power of social marketing. Instead they consider referrals and professional networking as the top drivers of business growth. Well, some B2B firms have figured out that social marketing is not very different from networking in the physical world. Done right, social marketing enables networking with influencers, peers, and prospectives. It also is an excellent avenue to establish thought leadership and support in-bound lead generation. According to Content Market Institute’s 2014 Benchmark Study, 87% of B2B companies employ social marketing (not including blogging) as a part of their overall content marketing strategy. Done strategically, social marketing can provide a boost to your website traffic, improve the quality and quantity of leads, and SEO ranking.

So how should you set up your Social Marketing to be Effective?

1. First and foremost, have a documented social strategy documented social strategy that addresses each of the following:

  • Goal Analysis – This should be your starting point and addresses issues such as: Who is the target audience? What is the key message that needs to be communicated? What is desired action and output?
  • Situation Analysis – figure out industry trends, authorities and patterns, popular sources of info etc.
  • Strategic Posture – This is where you nail down your value proposition – your “sweet spot” and figure out how to differentiate yourself from competition.
  • Client Positioning – How do you increase your influence by targeting key influencers and authorities in your field. This includes identifying groups, pages, and circles that you should increase your participation in.
  • Platform Strategy – This where you decide on the most relevant platforms and how you tactically plan to target that platform. Top four social channels favored most by B2B companies (in order of preference) are LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

For a complete social media strategy template, drop us a line at info@webtage.com and we will email it right to your inbox.

2.  Develop a formal social media policy. Social media policy governs the publication and commentary on social media sites by your dedicated social media staff. Hopefully, you have a dedicated staff – there is ample and consistent evidence that companies that have a documented content strategy and have a dedicated social marketing staff are most effective at social marketing compared to companies that don’t.

Social media sites are a reflection of your organization that any and every person with access to the Internet can potentially see. What you post on social sites and the tone of your voice should be no less carefully weighed than your in-person interactions with your professional community and prospects.  Make sure employees of agencies that represent you should have a very clear picture of how you want to be represented.

3.  Content Creation & Curation – Once you have a clear understanding of the “what, where, and how” of your social marketing plan, it’s time to do content creation. Too busy to create value content on a consistent basis? Content curation offers an opportunity to sift through the vast content that already exists on the web and share it on your social channels.  There are some rules here: Make sure the content you share is truly high quality and is engaging and/or informative. Also, include your own perspective on content you are sharing, bring in a level of personalization that is key in any effective social networking – digital or not! Find more details on the 40-60 rule that we advocate for your content strategy and how to do content mapping.

 

4. Social Management & Tools – There are terrific tools out there that allow for streamlined social marketing process. I will not go into a comprehensive list of social marketing tools, but will talk about some that are used by Marketing Pros for integrated social channel management & analytic. The top favorites are Hoot Suite& Sprout Social. A good social management tool especially for B2B marketers is Oktopost, which allows you to integrate your social media marketing, and customize your posts across channels, while allowing you to access your groups, company pages, and pofiles. This is very helpful for B2B marketers who need to adopt a different content style for different social channels and easily reach influencers and authorities by posting to groups to facilitate intellectual conversations and establish thought leadership. Other favorites are social monitoring and reputation management tools such as Radian6 for mid-level enterprises (an overkill for small businesses) and SocialMention & Mention for smaller enterprises that allow you to track social conversations around your brand and topics of interest and respond to concerns and opportunities.

5. Validate – Social marketing is an art and a science. You need to employ creativity and analytics to execute it well. The basic tenets of science, such as having a testable hypothesis, collecting and managing data, and analyzing the data to confirm or toss aside the hypothesis should be done on a regular basis with social marketing. If you are running LinkedIn ad campaigns to increase leads and conversions, make sure you are running A/B versions and running multiple campaigns so that you can find your sweet spot, bring down your cost-per-click, increase your opt-in and conversion rates and replicate the success all over again. If your goal is to increase traffic to the website, make sure you are racking your web analytics that provides traffic numbers from social channels. Look for bounce rates, entry and exit pages, time spent, demographics etc. Validate, validate, validate before moving ahead.

 

Let us know what has or hasn’t worked for your business in the social marketing arena! We look forward to your comments or drop us a line at snigdha@webtage.com

B2B Marketing Services in Naperville

Online Marketing is not Rocket Science

Posted on February 12, 2014 - 9:23 AM by

Online Marketing is not Rocket Science

 

I love SEO expert, Jill Whalen (she’s even got a Wikipedia page devoted to her!). Though she’s retired from her SEO life, she’s brought in a common-sense approach to the SEO and online marketing world that is like a whiff of fresh air in the make-it-more-complicated-than-it is digital marketing world. (Note: If you’d like to sample her views on SEO, read her archived High Rankings Newsletter).

 

This brings me to the question that I often field from business owners who are just beginning to debate whether they need a digital marketing agency for their marketing needs. “Why can’t we do online marketing ourselves? How complicated can it be?” My answer to them is that online marketing is not rocket science, but it requires specialized skills (some more than others), lots of dedicated time, and perseverance. “If you have all three, go for it,” is my honest answer.

 

Good online marketing, as I see it, requires a combination of outstanding research capabilities, creativity, technology know-how, and data management skills. Obviously, you also need good project and product management skills. Most importantly, you need to have the perseverance to do it consistently over a period of time. And test, test, test!

 

Digital Marketing Skill Sets

Research is the foundation of a good digital campaign. This involves researching not just the competitive landscape, industry trends, and gleaning out the most profitable keyword (which itself can be a massive undertaking if you start to get into big data), you also need to keep up with adapting strategies to business needs, changing algorithms, and technological resources.

 

Creativity­­ – In the online world, where people are overwhelmed with information, you have about 5 seconds to make an impression before your consumers will move on. If you do not strike a chord with them with the right words and the right visuals, you have failed to connect with them. Creativity and ability to connect with your consumers is critical in the online world!

 

Technological Tools – This is digital marketing after all! There is a plethora of IT, design, tracking, data analysis and other tools that you would need to run an effective marketing campaign. You may not need each one of them for your internal campaign, but make sure you have internal expertise to assess and the know-how to use the best ones available.

 

Data Management – An effective digital campaign should step beyond touchy-feely and should have in-built assessment tools to measure the effectiveness of a campaign. Create user personas, purchase cycle stages, run A/B strategy testing, pour over your web analytics, set up conversion goals. And test it again.

One very specialized area which deserves a special mention here is analytics which taps into big data to achieve highly-effective market segmentation, targeting, and conversions. For example, assume you are an online shop that sells in-house gym equipment and you set up a social ad campaign to reach your target audience. You could stretch your ad budget very thin if you do segmentation and targeting using traditional methods. Instead, you could tap into big social data to identify extremely targeted “low-funnel” consumers who are close to making an actual purchase and run a highly effective campaign.

 

Usability is Key in Effective Digital Campaigns

For all the complexities involved in digital campaign, the goal of any online marketing campaign is very simple – design and deliver your campaign to be useful and relevant for your end users. If users find your online sites useful, they will come back, they will engage, and they will convert. And search engines will notice!

So next time you think you need a digital agency for your marketing needs, make sure they don’t overwhelm you with jargon and make sure that they are clear on the end goal, which is to understand and serve your consumers. And do it well!

Feel free to drop me a line at snigdha@webtage.com!

Digital Marketing Services in Naperville

Struggling to Create A Great Content Marketing Campaign? Here are 10 Useful Tips & Tools

Posted on January 8, 2014 - 11:09 PM by

If you are like most businesses you need a solid content strategy to fuel your inbound marketing. However, it is a struggle for busy professionals to come up with great content ideas and turn it into a professional product. Here are tips and tools that will be helpful you in pulling together a content strategy:

  1. Start with a goal – Have a clear view of what you want your content marketing to achieve. For instance, do you wish to build a community around your service or product, generate traffic for your website, establish thought leadership & develop your brand, create quality leads, or something else? Your content strategy will vary greatly depending on your goal. If you are looking to establish thought leadership, your content should be informative and engaging and the output should be in the form of ebooks, newsletters, infographics etc.
  2. Listen to your customers! Successful content creators will tell you that the best content created around questions your consumers ask and the feedback they provide. Take commonly asked question and turn your answers into a blog topic.
  3. Build an organized content repository – Next time you find an article or post that you find engaging or useful, “clip” it using tools such as Evernote Web Clipper or Pocket. Make sure that your repository is organized so that you can find and view it later. This repository will be very useful when you are brainstorming content topics.
  4. The 40-40-20 Rule – Not all content that you use in your inbound marketing needs to be self-created. A “40-40-20 rule” is a good place to start your social strategy where about 40% of all content should be self-created, 40% is curated from third party sources, and 20% is user generated or contributed. Just make sure the content is top quality and is engaging and/or informative.
  5. Do content mapping – For content creation activities, take into account your user persona(s) and purchase lifecycle stages to map out your content. Have a different content output in mind to target users in different purchase cycles. Include informative material and visually attractive infographics if you want to spread awareness among targeted buyers with displayed interest in your area of expertise.  Once prospectives are in the “Consideration” phase, target them with specific content on your value proposition, such as, price & feature comparison infographics. If they in the “Decision” phase, lead them to a landing page with automated quote generation capabilities and follow up with customized emails.
  6. Content Type – Be cautious in the type of content you share on social channels. Make sure it’s not all self-promotion! Another good rule of thumb in social content strategy is the one-third rule – one-third is self-promotion, one-third is informative, and one-third should be general, fun shares and posts.
  7. Be Consistent– This one is obvious. The more consistent you are, the more results you will see. Whether it is building your brand, achieving visibility by targeting influencers, or getting quality leads, you will see best results if you are socially active.
  8. Use Social Management Tools – There are many useful social content management, curation, marketing, and analytical tools that can make help you streamline the content creation and dissemination process. From comprehensive social marketing management and analytic tools like Sprout Social and Hootsuite to specific B2B marketing tools, such as eGrabber to content curation tools like Swayy and Compfight, there is a plethora of tools that can make social marketing effective and precise. 
  9. Develop Metrics – Assign metrics to track your goal conversions. If you are looking to build thought leadership and manage your online reputation, make sure you use social tracking and monitoring tools like SocialMention, Mention, and Radian6 to track social mentions of your brand and respond to concerns and opportunities.
  10. Validate – Set up A/B tests for all content marketing strategies. Track and analyze your campaign and make sure you track at least these basic metrics (and do it for each social channel so that you know which channel is most effective for you):
      • Reach & Engagement – Be sure to track your audience growth rate as well as whether they are engaged with your content.
      • Channel Reports – How many visits is each channel generating? What is the return visit rate? What is the bounce rate?
      • Conversions – Set up conversion metrics and track how many conversions is each channel generating.
      • Influence – How influential are you on social media? Track it with the help of social social tracking and mention tools.
      • Response Rate – Ho many interactions are you having with your prospects and leads? How many mentions of your company are you responding to?

What are you favorite tricks and tips for content generation & marketing? Feel free to comment below or drop us a line at snigdha@webtage.com

 

Content Marketing Services in Naperville